To Hiss or Not To Hiss…

If you want to appreciate your language, read the comics pages; I wouldn’t miss them! Most of the time I admire the way the writers use language — they love to play with words, which I particularly enjoy, especially the puns. As an editor, I am obsessed with editing printed text — and in doing so with the comic section recently, I came across the “hissing” problem. What caught my eye was the phrase “an historic event”.

What is the hissing problem? you may ask. This involves the decision to use the hissing sound when a word begins with the letter H, which results in deciding whether to use the article “a” or “an” to precede it. Some words starting with H make a sound; some don’t. Let me show you what I mean.

Repeat after me:

1) honestly, hour, heiress, hors d’oeuvre
2) history, hammer, humble, hymn, hundred
3) herb*

With the first row, you did not hiss; these are words with a silent H and use the article “an”.

In the second row, you hissed all over the place; each word begins with a pronounced H and is preceded with the article “a”.

When you reached the third row, you may have hesitated. “Herb” is one of those words that can be pronounced either way, depending on how erudite you wish to sound (or whose name you’re struggling with). Oh yes, many mispronounce the H-words, pretending to sound more learned. Others simply imply the sound by using “an” instead of “a”. Who would not say “an historic occasion”, sliding across the H? The reason is that it’s easier to pronounce. However, the written phrase appears correctly as “a historic occasion”. This conundrum dates back to the British days when the Cockney accent omitted all of the Hs that started words.

There is another letter that offers a similar problem: how to pronounce the U at the beginning of a word.

Listen as you pronounce these words:

1) united, utensil, unanimous, universal, usual
2) untie, umpire, ulterior, ugly, umbrella, utter

In the first row, you pronounced the words as if they begin with Y (the yoo or the eew-sound).

The words in the second row begin with an UH sound and utilize the article “an”.

Take care, not only with the way you pronounce words in spoken language, but the way you write words that have multiple pronunciations. And read the comics pages every day! Not only will it help with word usage, but you’ll stay young with laughter.

*Thanks to artist Dan Piraro, who draws the clever (and grammatical) Pizarro comic strip, for permission to use this comic that fell out of his talented pen the day after I originally posted this piece.